UCLA Botches Cancellation, NC State PISSED (& Tons of College Football Talk)

[Music] usc not involved in post-season play here in 2021 unfortunately for college football fans a number of other teams who were supposed to be involved in post-season play will not be hitting the field uh the most recent announcement involving the holiday bowl with ucla taking on nc state that game has been cancelled due to covet issues with ucla we got matt zimmick on the line as we always do each and every tuesday to talk usc football the pac-12 and the nation you can catch matt's work on trojans wire matt merry christmas happy holidays i hope everything's going well merry christmas happy holidays to you mark really appreciate it so yeah unfortunately uh as we just got on the line together here in the last couple of minutes you told me that you were finishing up a recap of what went down in san diego regarding ucla's football team and not being able to field enough players to compete tonight in the holiday bowl but uh this is i believe the sixth game that's been impacted in the bowl season it has now the the plot twist here mark is that this game got called off five hours before kickoff like going right down to the wire and apparently per bruce feldman who broke the this story ucla was was good enough to play yesterday but not today like boy that is just such a last minute deal and you know so i don't want to say like okay you just have to push through and play no matter what i mean we want to honor public health and safety but this is no way to run a business and this is no way to treat paying customers this is definitely no way to treat the nc state fans who went all the way from raleigh to san diego across the whole united states the contiguous 48 states uh to see a game you know they were excited about that we were excited about but boy you got to have a better plan you got to have more contingencies um you know it's very interesting uh you know next week we have lsu in the texas bowl and lsu appealed to the ncaa to have uh to for a waiver so that garrett nusmeier could play without burning his red shirt like that's the decision lsu is waiting for from the ncaa to hopefully allow garrett nutsmeyer to play because if if he can't then you lsu has to play a walk-on at quarterback but doesn't that bring up the larger point right mark that we you know bowl games should not count toward red shirts like that should be pretty obvious one would have to think that this situation with ucla is going to move the ball in that direction but we should be doing other things to make sure that these bowl games that people travel across the country for you know they're not scheduled months in advance they're scheduled weeks in advance like you need to put on the event you need to find a solution uh so that people you know commit to holiday travel they're making a sacrifice of time money resources you need to give them what they pay for so like we need to find out ways to expand rosters and the other thing is and we're going to touch on this a little bit in a it's kind of a separate thing but it's still kind of under this larger umbrella of issues that if we want to reduce players opting out of these bowl games such as the peach bowl such as the rose bowl you know showcase games players should be given a take-home paycheck you're not like not a kings ransom but like give them a thousand dollar check like you know espn's making enough money enough money is being generated that you can do that uh and you can honor the work that's going into this from the athlete side uh you know in terms of the holiday bowl like there's a arash markazi long-time los angeles-based journalist he tweeted out a lovely photo of petco park uh the new home for the game all decked out painted end zones the football layout for a baseball stadium you know a lot of man hours went into putting on that event and staging it and now for what so bo hopefully this is going to reform i you know i'm not anti-bull i'm just against the way the bulls are are are put out you know in terms of the current format you just have to treat your product and value it a lot more than what we've seen so you know you college football will hopefully dramatically substantially reform the way it administers these bowl games so that we don't have these kinds of situations again with nc state ucla it's avoidable and it shouldn't be viewed as acceptable by any means ucla was eligible under the protocols to have played a football game yesterday but not today also along the lines in which you're hitting one of the reasons we have the main reason we have these crazy names of these bowl games is because of the sponsorships well the sponsorships are the the outdated version of nil to a certain extent why don't we just use some of that money that's being paid to the various well tv networks first and foremost but everybody else that paid by that particular company and circumvent that money and pay the players to try to insure the product i mean you you put it beautifully mark i mean i there's not much for me to add there like there should be a way to just fold that into an nil provisions and enable players to get a cut so that they're not opting out of these bowl games like that's you put it you put it great and hopefully that'll be done in some form or fashion as i stated off the top of course following a four 4-8 season usc not involved in post-season play but we would expect that to change immediately next season and uh we've hit a point in which even the new year six games as you will know matt in tracking all of this as recently as just a couple years ago seemed to be safe and now they've even hit a level in which of course you have better teams in those games therefore you're more likely to have more nfl prospects therefore those games are not being seen and placed on the same standard as they have in the past therefore we have opt-outs at the rose bowl the peach bowl and all the new year six games and in particular we've got near and dear to your geographic situation there at the rose bowl with ohio state and utah the buckeyes have four players opting out and you just have recently don't want to give away your article because we want to send people over to trojans wire but related that to what usc could be facing in a game that if there's a brand that is attached to the rose bowl having won more rose bowls than any school in history by far it is of course usc and the rose bowl yeah so you know with uh garrett wilson and crystal ave opting out of the rose bowl for ohio state i mean so the rose bowl is not viewed as above opting out i mean at least for these players like they did not feel like whoa i have to play in the rose bowl like this is a life moment for me nope gotta prepare for the nfl draft so if the rose bowl is not a playoff semi-final it's not worth playing i mean that's the message those ohio state players are sending and i'm not criticizing them for doing that it's their body it's their nfl career they have the right to do that no criticism toward them but this is the attitude in the air now like this is the new world this is the new environment this is the new culture where the rose bowl is just another exhibition game for a number of players and so that hits pretty deeply you know that that cuts deep certainly out here in the pac-12 and of course you know usc under lincoln riley is probably gonna get into a situation that pete carroll's usc teams faced a lot you know you're on the cut line trying to get into you know the national championship tournament uh or you know in pete carroll's day it was just the bcs national championship game and so the making the rose ball often meant you weren't playing for the national championship and that would obviously create a great tension and a great disconnect you know because the rose bowl is supposed to be sacred at usc much as it was sacred at ohio state i mean imagine woody hayes uh coaching ohio state today and seeing these players opt out like first off i don't think he would have allowed it secondly like if if they insisted on doing it like he would have had a heart attack it's just it's impossible to imagine so i mean the rose bowl was supposed to be sacred and now it isn't anymore and so it just invites the question of you know in a couple years before with the playoffs still at four teams like if when the playoff goes to 12 assuming that happens at some later point you know usc is probably going to be in it pretty regularly and the rose bowl might be a quarterfinal and so that tension point will go away but but let's say the playoff doesn't happen until 2025 2026 we could easily have a situation where in 2023 or 2024 with a 14 playoff usc narrowly misses the playoff you know it uh loses that a game late in the season just as it did under pete carroll uh in 2006 to ucla so the rose bowl is a consolation prize and it might feel like a disappointment but really if you win the rose bowl at usc it it shouldn't ever feel like a bad year but you know that's what the bcs did right and and the playoff has not fixed that obviously usc hasn't been in the college football playoff this was only a bcs era problem for usc but but you know in two or three years we're probably going to have that tension point where usc is in the playoff hunt narrowly misses the playoff and quote unquote has to settle for the rose bowl and we should never be in that position right it should always be special for usc for michigan for ohio state to play in the grand daddy you know and it is the the first bowl game uh of them all it's what got all of this started even before you had the sugar the orange the cotton um you know some of the most famous and important games in college football history were rose bowls from the 1920s 1925 game between the four horsemen of notre dame and pop warner's stanford team that was a seminal moment in college football history and then the very next year in many ways the birth of alabama football like alabama became alabama going all the way back to that 1926 rose bowl upset of washington if alabama doesn't win that game the crimson titan might never have thought hims of themselves as a program worthy of aspiring to absolute greatness in college football we might not have nick saban uh leading a dynastic power at alabama if you didn't have that rose bowl in 1926 so you know there's significance here there's stature here there's tradition here and it's all being undercut and it's a process that began with the bcs when you know you could go when going to the rose bowl or going for an sec team going to the sugar bowl meant that you didn't play for the national tile and it just create created that emotional separation where something that which was sacred for decades stopped being sacred and we have to find a way to bring that back to college football because matt for all the things that have changed in college football let's say in the last 40 years that's one thing that has not changed is that there are players participating for these high level teams that have secured their nfl status the scouting report on them in the nfl and they are playing in bowl games that are not meaningful if you consider the national championship to be the only thing meaningful uh that they are playing in bowl games that were once considered sacred regardless of whether it was number six playing number 14 in the rose bowl or cotton bowl but there was a certain status uh to playing in those bowl games and we would have never imagined anyone would have opted out but the the circumstances were no different you had nfl caliber players playing in a game that did not factor into a national championship but they chose to play they didn't know any better if that's how you want to phrase it but now we are 40 years later and they're making that decision to not play in that game so for example uh you know you painted a picture that made me think back to usc and ohio state in the 85 rose bowl and i'm thinking about all the nfl players in that game they were playing in a game that did not factor uh into the national championship vote both teams had about three losses but you had chris carter and chris spielman and jim lachey and pepper johnson a bevy of nfl players all over that field keith byers it was a rose bowl they played the rose bowl and and it was a joy to play in the rose bowl it was it was your season it was the culmination of what you worked for in the 1980s and so it you know i haven't i've mentioned this on previous weeks on your show i haven't mentioned this one so it just bears repeating since we are about to have the rose bowl we're in the middle of bowl week working up to the big new year's weekend and just bears repeating that if we went back to a mid-1980s style bowl system but we also did a few things you know we increased the roster sizes for players as we've been talking about you give players a a small but real paycheck uh for for the bowl game uh and you also in terms of you know the the national championship picture you introduce flex scheduling into the regular season you put one flex scheduled game you rotate home and away for the various teams in the power fives and the fbs every year you do that you know like byu and coastal carolina they played a game on 72 hours notice last year it blew up all the myths about oh the logistics are too impossible to flex schedule a game no you just you do that one time you reserve an open date in november each year it's a tv bonanza for espn you do like michigan oklahoma second weekend of november uh you flex schedule it you announce the match up in the middle of october something like that based on the first half of the season results and it would just be an enormous windfall and it would you know create these national championship eliminator games you do all that and then you have the normal traditional 1985 style new year's day bowl lineup where the sec champion goes to the sugar and is happy the big 12 champion goes to the orange bowl and is happy hack 12 champion big ten champion go to the rose bowl and they're happy and then you do a plus one after all the bowls are over to decide the national champion uh you don't have any ranking shows you have a rankings reveal after the bowl games to decide that those two teams that are going to play in the national title game and that way you you're not gonna you might not guarantee participation 100 participation uh from all players in all of those new year's day bowl games like the cotton bowl might be between a number eight and a number 11 team and the players on those two teams know well even if we win we're not going to be part of the national title but you certainly aren't going to have players opt out of the rose bowl if if one of the two teams has you know maybe like a 35 40 chance uh of being in that plus one national championship game so there's a way to do this better and i i think we are headed for a 12-team playoff but you know let's say that the powers that be want to experiment with this 12 team playoff and what i mean by that mark is no 12-year deal you know let's not lock ourselves into a plan that carries past a decade because this is a 12-year the college football playoff was initially a 12 year plan from 2014 through 2025. let's just try like a three or four year deal and then if if that you know doesn't really satisfy everybody let's go back to 1985 but you add a plus one at the end you know to resolve the debates such as colorado georgia tech 1990 miami washington 1991. used to have that one game at the end which you know it wouldn't have always solved the problem but it usually would have and given that you're keeping all that tradition or in this case bringing back that tradition that you had in the 1980s uh when the rose bowl was still sacred that would be worth the trade-off for college football in my opinion so man you've brought this up in the past this is the first time you've uh framed it up uh top to bottom so you're peaking my interest here because i'm a playoff guy in that this is an oxymoron because i'm a traditionalist i love the bowl games and so in a perfect world i would want to retain all the pageantry and the tradition and the importance of the bowl games but still uh have a playoff system that determines okay who has earned a national championship okay that has basically played itself out for the past seven now eight years to show us that that the two cannot coexist okay you're peaking my interest because on the surface when you mentioned this few weeks ago i thought okay i like the idea i'm thinking of obviously the split national championships would have been resolved other than that i'm gonna have to go year by year and i'm not expecting perfection as you mentioned there is no flawless system it doesn't exist um but i would like to go year to year maybe in the last 40 or 50 years to figure out uh had all those been played out and then even since the bcs if we would have just gone with a traditional bowl set up and during the playoff and sent the various conference champions to their locations how that would have played out of course we wouldn't have known the winners of the games but we could take a projection to see how that would have played out interesting we'd have a michigan utah rose bowl for one thing interesting which you know sign me up that would be a great game just as i think utah ohio state's going to be a very good game and i guess you still would have the possibility let's say it's 2011 or any other time when you had arguably the two best teams in one conference they still default to that next game uh the sec runner-up goes and plays as a at large at the orange bowl or the citrus bolt wherever they're going to play we'd have to figure that out but if it was back to the at-large system in which all these bulls had at large spots except for the rose bowl then they're playing the best possible opponent in another game and you possibly have a rematch somewhere but at least it's an earned rematch based on those new year's day results absolutely yeah with a plus one you still do have like it's not a bracket you know it's not a bracketed one versus four two versus three but you still have the the fundamental component of a tournament in that you win your way into a game instead of it just being chosen now now obviously you're kind of straddling the line it's a bit of a gray area but with a plus one it's unavoidable that you have to win your way into it like you can't we can't have a deal in like 2003 where oklahoma was unbeaten heading into the last weekend it lost and it still made the bcs championship game like you could not have that that would definitely be out of the picture uh you also look at georgia this year same same deal was unbeaten everyone knew just as a matter of the actual politics that georgia was guaranteed a spot but at that you know it's it's not really the way it ought to happen so you know with a with a plus one you get two teams that win their way into a game and i think that's you know in an imperfect system it would be worth having that and you still get again you would have fewer players opting out across all these bowl games also keep in mind that you know in the old days it was a five game setup of bowls you have the fiesta and the cotton in the early afternoon rose bowl mid to late afternoon and then the sugar and orange at night with the new year six you now have the peach bowl as a as a bowl game with heightened status you have it in atlanta you have it in the spiffy stadium so you now could have a six game uh new year's new year's rollout maybe you play one of those games on new year's eve um to kind of take the place of what the blue bonnet bowl was maybe um but but you could also just do a six game new year's day rollout and you know we gave this a try we're talking about this meaning the bcs and the college football playoff you know having um the various big bowl games spread out a little bit some on new year's eve some on january one some on january two three it was worth trying because like if for for people of a certain age you and i are not maybe not the exact same age but we're kind of from from a come from a similar generation you know there was a part of us in the 1980s that did want to be able to watch more of each bowl game uh sometimes it got really crazy and there was too much of a of an overlap you know between the sugar and orange uh we both spent many new year's nights flipping back between the sugar and orange uh and we'd like to have seen more of those games so when the bcs concept emerged there was the thought oh okay we're going to get to see each bowl game in a stand-alone fashion it was worth trying but now that we've gone through this for you know roughly two decades bcs and playoff that's all you know it's a little bit over 20 years i think we can just see hey we've tried it and 1980s we're better you know that that pulsating excitement of seeing you know don crickey and bob trumpy on nbc and the orange bowl and keith jackson and frank broyles oh man uh in the sugar bowl i mean we get we we looked at the other method we looked at the alternative weight we tried it 1980s were better like like that's how you learn right you don't know until you try so we've tried the other way but i'm ready to go back to 1985. i don't know about you but i'm ready they weren't better but you're adding the one game that will make it better that's true that's true 1985 plus yes some obvious reforms yes so not that we need to sit here and work out all the details we could be here for hours but um i would think that the big 12 instead of going to the orange bowl i'm going to mess with tradition to a certain extent because we've got to accommodate the eggs yeah they go to the cotton bowl and the role of the old southwest conference yeah yeah absolutely and the people you know the two highest-ranked teams that don't make those games i don't know it can be worked out well and and you know we have uh we we could have another round of conference realignment you know if we went to uh a 1985 style bowl system because some schools might say hey maybe the conference affiliation isn't worth it or they might say you know we we would like to play in this particular bowl game so maybe we should jump out of a conference to facilitate uh going to a particular bowl as kind of our bowl you know the way uh usc and ohio state always had the rose bowl it would be interesting to see i mean we're not we're probably not going to have this world mark but if we were to entertain visions of how it would come about it might spur some reconsiderations in terms of uh in terms of alignment matt's got an article out uh basically looking at what usc may need to deal with in the future with these opt-outs in a rose bowl appearance with the ohio state situation where the buckeyes have fallen short of the playoff and have their two elite wide receivers plus nicholas uh petite freire their top offensive tackle and haskell garrett their top defensive tackle so four nfl bound players not playing for the buckeyes uh on the usc front before we let you go matt uh offensive lineman bobby haskins moving in from virginia yeah and uh for people who are watching here on the voice of college football um it's notable that at least three virginia offensive linemen have entered the transfer portal since the tony elliot coaching change was announced that's very interesting uh makes you wonder what's going on in terms of like whether these transfers were encouraged by elliott or whether it's just players responding to evolving events on the ground but anyway uh bobby haskins which you mentioned mark uh he so he was an experienced pass protector for brennan armstrong at virginia so he has a lot of reps a lot of seasoning and is very highly regarded among uh offensive linemen in the country so it's not only uh pulling a significant prospect in the transfer portal but it's also recruiting on a national level like it definitely fits exactly what lincoln riley has said he wants to do you know he said he wants to turn over around 35 roster spots so you know i mean again it's going to be hard for him to get that number but even if you fall short if you still make an ambitious effort okay you still turn over 25 to 30 roster spots that's still substantial and if he's getting quality transfers such as bobby haskins you know that is definitely going to upgrade usc's roster for 2022 so it's a very exciting development for a program that you know is about to enter january and you're going to have other high profile recruits not transfers but recruits announced their decisions after the high school all-american games and other events so usc continues to build momentum under lincoln riley that's very clear right now right folks man sammic trojan's wire head on over there check out his work covering usc and the pac-12 matt we always appreciate the conversations it's always a good time and i will continue to have those wheels churning upstairs uh considering this um format or the plus one format you've proposed i know you'll think of something good mark happy new year to you and yours